HOW MANY ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE JUST A PART OF YOU, WAITING TO BE FOUND?
The game has changed.
Fresh from her first brush with mortality, a fragile Sadie Matthau is playing human in New York while the Survivors endure unimaginable tragedy. Wrought wit...
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I FOLLOWED MARK, AND EVERETT FOLLOWED ME. WE NEARED THE church, and I finally began to feel things. Seeping into my pores, into my bloodstream. Grief. The real kind. The life-altering, soul-crushing kind.
She wasn't in the sanctuary as I guessed it would have been logical for her to be. Was she in a casket? I wondered. Had they built one? The first for them, but certainly not the last?
In the elders' meeting room, Rebecca sat at the head of the giant marble table, alone, her fingertips pressed together, her lips pressed to them. She said nothing to us when we came into the room, simply rose to her feet to make the door to the apothecary appear for us, something none of us could do on our own.
My movements were robotic. I took a step when Mark did. I said nothing. I felt nothing. I touched no one. Somehow not even myself.
In the apothecary, there was still no Lizzie. Sarah was standing at the round table with the floating cauldrons and vessels, beneath the floating oil lamp chandelier. She said nothing either, but she came to me, her eyes filled with a sorrow I was fighting so hard to keep from feeling. She put her cold, ancient hands on either side of my face, and then she burst into tears. Real tears. Warm pink cheeks, red eyes, and salty water on her face. These were human attributes I did not possess, and for that — for once — maybe I was grateful. At least a little.
She walked to the corner of the room and put her hands to the front of a wardrobe, smearing a mercury-silver substance across them and muttering words to herself. It was the incantation that had been a particular source of contention between Lizzie and me: the Fateor.
The wardrobe opened to reveal another dirt-dug hallway, where it had once contained only old notebooks and journals of spells and incantations and other magic the elders had learned in their time here. I saw then that those had been discarded into piles on the floor to clear the way for this new secret passageway.
So many secrets. Always secrets.
This hallway was narrower, but it was lit by hanging pieces of fire Sarah and Rebecca and the others must have left here. For us? I wasn't sure.
My throat closed up when I could see the end of the hallway. The end was a haphazardly carved shape, a makeshift doorway, that was dark enough that I could see nothing beyond it. But once we arrived at it, somehow I was sure that we were there.
We crossed a threshold into a suffocating space, dirt ceilings so low my head nearly touched them and Everett had to crouch. Mark did something to make more light appear. Then I saw her.
It was so much worse than I could have imagined. The silence in the space was startling. I had never found myself in a room with three people and my mind silent. But here, I could read no one. Not Everett and Mark with their bulwarks. Not Lizzie who wasn't a person at all. At least not anymore.
